Freshwater + Unthinkable + Miss Laila, Armed & Dangerous + New Books from Bloomsbury

Before I begin this week’s reading natter, I wanted to ask if you have any strong opinions about the frequency of this newsletter. I’m dithering between weekly and fortnightly. The thing is, there are weeks when I have to throw myself into work that threatens to pay me, and that leaves me with very little time to read. In which case, I have barely a book to talk about, if that. Once in two weeks seems like a sensible option but on the other hand, there are weeks like this one which was busy, but full of such good books that my head is exploding in a good way. So fortnightly or weekly? What do you think?

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I forgot to mention last week that I read Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous by Manu Joseph. It’s one of those books that you can finish reading in a couple of hours because Joseph’s prose has a swift, smooth gait. Sure, you’ll go from gnashing your teeth to foaming just a little around the mouth at some of the commentary that Joseph tucks into his storytelling, but he’s not offensive enough to make you want to abandon the book. Joseph’s opinions are like a pesky mosquito — invisible for most of the time until it suddenly whines into existence by your ear, only to quickly lurk back into the shadows where it stays until you’ve almost forgotten how annoying it is. Which is when it re-emerges with a little whine.

But Joseph’s opinions aren’t really the point of the book. Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous is a reimagining of the Ishrat Jahan case in which a 19-year-old girl was taken into illegal custody killed in a staged encounter killing by Gujarat police. Reading this book made me return to one of my favourite questions: What do stories mean, what do they do in a culture and society where facts and data either don’t exist or are prone to manipulation? Often, fiction offers an alternative point of view to that which is considered fact because it’s pronounced as real and credible by authorities trusted by society. For example, a court order or the findings of an governmental probe are held as binding because a society trusts those institutions. In a society where you can't or don't, what is the difference between what is held up as fact and what is written as fiction? Fiction can tease out possibilities and use loopholes as launchpads (massively mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean). But when you know the institutions are compromised and the hierarchies are held in place by manipulation, what position does fiction occupy? Could it be more credible and reliable than ‘fact’?

I doubt anyone will mistake Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous as factual, but here's a story whose facts are viciously contested. Does it fall upon fiction (rather than documentation and reportage) to be more responsible and faithful to the truth of Jahan's story?

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I’d mentioned Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi a few issues ago and I’m happy to report, Freshwater is every bit as incandescent and disturbing as it promised to be. You could see Emezi’s novel as one about spirits who are stuffed into the skin of a young woman. You could see it as a magic-real account of mental illness. Both are accurate, both are true and together, when they overlap like coloured filters, they allow you to glimpse inside the marble room of the heroine’s mind.

Ada, Emezi’s protagonist, carries within her spirits termed as ogbanje in the Igbo mythology of Nigeria. Mostly through the ogbanjes’ perspectives, Freshwater shows Ada’s childhood and then settles into her experiences as a young student in America. The ogbanje are careless, cruel, powerful and hungry. Some of them speak as a collective, a rushing ravenousness that has only disdain for this skin bag in which they’re trapped. Some of them have names, like Asughara who emerges and takes charge of Ada’s body when Ada enters an abusive relationship. The spirits push Ada into dark corners, towards cutting, eating disorders, suicide and depression. But they’re also her protectors, helping her combat those who want her to cower. They’re her demons and her strength, which makes for a reading experience that I can only describe as tumultuous. Half the time, as the ogbanje toy with Ada, you wish you could exorcise her. But then, when Ada is faced with human monsters, you feel the coursing flood of relief because there is no talisman as powerful as the ogbanje.

Emezi sprinkles words that you may not know into Freshwater. For instance, Asughara tosses “No wahala” into her conversation all the time. (“No wahala” roughly translates to “No problem”, I’m told.) I love what this pidgin adds to the sound of the sentences, breaking the familiar rhythms of English and showing that the coloniser's tool can in fact be reshaped by the postcolonial. It seems to be done casually, but Emezi’s control over her language and writing is masterful. She knows just how much of 'otherness' she should include in order to emphasise we’re not in Kansas (or Oxbridge), but at no point do you as a reader who doesn't know Hausa, Igbo etc, feel like you're floundering. In Freshwater, you’re just floating gently down the stream of strangeness. My copy of Freshwater is full of underlines and “gasp” and “dear god yes” notes. The book is full of magnificent, menace-laced lines like, “The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin.” Emezi’s prose is like a perfect bass line: rhythmic, resonant and plucking at something so deep inside you. Add to this her wit and her ability to craft voices, and you have a novel that swallows you whole.

I’m still processing the end of the novel, so I’m not going to discuss that here, but I kinda love the cameo that Jesus Christ, whom the ancient ogbanje dismiss as a young upstart, has in Freshwater. Compared to the early and middle sections, when Asughara is in charge of Ada, the closing of the book felt duller and more lethargic. But like I said, I still need to process it. The first three-quarters of Freshwater are magnificent and unputdownable. Maybe I’ll feel the same way about the end when I’ve finished with it in my head.

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From a novel about a person with voices in their head, I picked up a book about people with weirdly-wired brains. Evidently, I like having themes to my reading. In Unthinkable, Helen Thompson tracks down nine people whose brains work just a little differently from what is considered normal. One of them sees “auras”, another thinks he’s turning into a tiger, one can remember every day of his life, another can get lost in her own home. While scientific papers are only interested in what the brain does, Thompson wants to document the people too, jotting down their personal histories. She describes this as “romantic science”, which is a lovely term and if there was more of this stuff going around, I might even have considered studying the science subjects back when I was in school.

What makes Thompson’s perspective interesting is that she brings together two aspects that are often held as distinct: the brain and the personality. We tend to think of the brain as a thing that’s doing its own thing. It’s probably an extension of the old separation of heart and mind. Thompson, however, argues that all our values, emotions and the other niggly bits that make up our personas, it’s all in our biology. And that biology is complex, which makes it both frustrating and fascinating. To quote Thompson:

“Our inability to understand our own minds is the price we pay for the ability to question it in the first place. Back in that first lesson with Clive, I was told by my professor that ‘If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’”

Thompson isn’t as stylish a writer as Oliver Sacks, but there’s a simple lucidity to her prose which works well with this topic. She manages to make very complex, medical ideas seem like they’re easy to grasp. Plus, I just loved the people she’d selected for this book. Unthinkable moves almost like a novel about curiosity and discovery. It’s a quiet adventure and one that makes you think about how the extraordinary can be contained in people who seem ordinary.

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UPCOMING TITLES FROM BLOOMSBURY

Whither Indian Judiciary
Justice Markandey Katju
Non-fiction, Rs 599

“Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the Court of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya,
mentions cases being heard and decided by the Emperor in his book, Indica.
Similarly in Whither Indian Judiciary, Justice Katju has given several historical accounts
of the functioning of the Indian judiciary.” Yep, that’s how the official description of this book begins, with Megasthenes. Knowing how whimsical Katju can be, this book could be massively entertaining, entirely cuckoo or flatly boring.

Norse Mythology
Neil Gaiman
Fiction, Rs 399

I’m a huge fan of Gaiman and his writing, but for those who have a passing acquaintance with these stories and characters, Norse Mythology isn’t particularly riveting. If you’ve never heard of Odin, Loki, Freya et al, then this one’s for you.

Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
Fiction, Rs 499

About effing time that there was an Indian edition to this one. Shamsie’s novel was nominated for the Booker Prize last year and dammit all, she was robbed. (Ok, perhaps not really robbed since Lincoln in the Bardo is beautiful and brilliant.) A modern-day Antigone set against the backdrop of terrorism and brown identity, Home Fire is amazing and unputdownable.

The Night Ferry
Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer (trans: Charlotte Barslund)
Fiction, Rs 399

Apparently, this is the best in Danish crime fiction and Detective Chief Konrad Simonsen has something of a following because his first adventure (The Hanging) was a massive success. In this one, Simonsen has to figure out why someone would crash a boat, leading to the death of four adults and sixteen children.

All the Beloved Ghosts
Alison MacLeod
Fiction, Rs 399

This volume of short stories blend fiction, biography and memoir, taking the reader into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures like Sylvia Plath and Princess Diana (among others). MacLeod’s language is usually beautiful and should be reason enough to pick up this volume.

Brother
David Chariandy
Fiction, Rs 499

The coming-of-age story of two brothers who are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, set in Canada. The novel has been described as “grit lit” and the little I’ve read of it is fantastic. Take these few lines, for example: “We were losers and neighbourhood schemers. We were the children of the help, without futures. We were, none of us, what our parents wanted us to be. We were not what any other adults wanted us to be. We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.” You can hear the rhythm and music of Chariandy’s style. There’s not a comma I’d change in those sentences.

The Song Rising
Samantha Shannon
Fiction, Rs 399

Book 3 of the Bone Season series and I could swear this came out around the middle of last year, so why does it take a whole year for an Indian edition? Sigh. Paige Mahoney is the Underqueen, ruling over London’s criminal population and neck-deep in crises. If you haven’t read the first two books, you should. Shannon’s a wonderful writer, but I needed to keep a notebook handy to remember all the characters and their, umm, groupings.

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Dear Reader will be back either next week or in two weeks. Hopefully, you will help me figure out the frequency of this thing. Thank you for reading.